Blood Sport

Chapter Thirteen

I parked a hired car in some scrub off the road leading to Orpheus Farm, and smoked a rare cigarette. The fierce afternoon sun roasted through the metal roof and a water mirage hung in a streak over the dry road. A day for lizards to look for shade. They’d run out of air-conditioned heaps at the hire firms: I’d had to take one of those old fashioned jobs where you breathed fresh air by opening the window. The air in question was as fresh as last week’s news and as hot as tomorrow’s.

At five past four Eunice and Lynnie passed unseeingly across my bows, heading back to Santa Barbara. I finished the cigarette and stubbed it out carefully in the flaked chromium ashtray. I looked at my fingernails for ten minutes. No special inspiration. At half past four I started the car, pointed its nose towards Orpheus, and went to call on Uncle Bark.

This time I drove straight up to the house and rang the ornate bell. A houseboy came: all on the same scale as at Jeff Roots’s. When he went to find Culham James I followed quietly on his heels, so my host, even if he had meant to, had no chance to say he was out. The houseboy opened the door on to a square comfortable office — sitting room and Culham James was revealed sitting at his desk with a green telephone receiver to his ear.

He gave the houseboy and myself a murderous glare between us which changed to reasonable affability once he’d got control of it. ‘I’ll call you later,’ he said to the telephone. ‘A Mr Hawkins has this minute arrived... that’s right... later then.’ He put down the receiver and raised his eyebrows.

‘Did you miss something this morning?’ he asked.

‘No... should we have done?’

He shook his head in mild annoyance. ‘I am merely asking the purpose of this return visit.’

‘My colleague and I wanted answers to one or two extra questions about the precautions you take against fire, especially as regards those two exceptionally valuable stallions... er... Moviemaker and Centigrade.’

Under his suntanned face, behind the white bracket of eyebrows, Culham James Offen was beginning to enjoy a huge joke. It fizzed like soda water in his pale blue eyes and bubbled in his throat. He was even having difficulty in preventing himself from sharing it: but after a struggle he had it nailed down under hatches, and calm with a touch of severity took over. We went solemnly through the farce of fire precautions, me leaning on his desk and checking off Walt’s solid sounding inventions one by one. They mostly had to deal with the amount of supervision in the stallions’ barn at night. Whether there were any regular patrols, any dogs loose on watch, any photoelectric apparatus for detecting opacity, such as heavy smoke?

Offen cleared his throat and answered no to the lot.

‘We have the extremely expensive and reliable sprinkler system which you saw this morning,’ he pointed out. ‘It is thoroughly tested every three months, as I told you earlier.’

‘Yes. Thank you, then. I guess that’s all.’ I shut my notebook. ‘You’ve been most helpful, Mr Offen.’

‘You’re welcome,’ he said. The joke rumbled in his voice, but was coloured now with unmistakable malice. High time to go, I thought: and went.

When I got back to The Vacationer some while later I found Eunice and Lynnie and Walt sitting in a glum row behind empty glasses. I flopped into a chair opposite them and said, ‘Why the mass depression?’

‘You’re late,’ Walt said.

‘I told you not to wait dinner.’ I caught a passing waiter on the wing and arranged refills all round.

‘We were considering a search party,’ Eunice said.

I looked at all three of them more carefully. ‘You’ve been comparing notes,’ I said resignedly.

‘I think it’s terrible of you... wicked,’ Lynnie burst out. ‘To have made me go and deliberately... deliberately... put you in such frightful danger.’

‘Lynnie stop it. I wasn’t in any danger... here I am, aren’t I?’

‘But Walt said...’

‘Walt needs his brains seen to.’

Walt glared and compressed his mouth into a rigid line. ‘You didn’t tell me you’d arranged for Offen to know you were the man who took Chrysalis. And you didn’t tell me the Clives had tried to kill Mr Teller.’

‘And you didn’t tell me,’ Eunice added, ‘that the couple in the background of the photograph Lynnie showed Culham Offen had tried to kill you too.’

‘Or you’d never have let Lynnie show it to him?’

‘No,’ she said slowly.

‘Just as well I didn’t.’

‘And you deliberately misled me by saying you wanted to clear Offen. It wasn’t true.’

‘Er... no. But I did want you to behave naturally with him. And anyway, why all the fuss?’

‘We thought...’ Lynnie said in a subdued voice. ‘We almost thought... as you were gone so long... that you... that they...’

‘They didn’t,’ I pointed out obviously, smiling.

‘But won’t you please explain why?’ Lynnie said. ‘Why did you want me to give you away like that?’

‘Several reasons. One was to make Dave safer.’

‘I don’t see how,’ Eunice objected.

‘By letting Offen know, and through him the Clives, that we could prove the Clives were in England and beside the Thames on the day of Dave’s accident. Murder by accident is only a good idea as long as there’s no apparent motive and the murderers have no apparent connection with the victim. We’ve shown them that we know their motive and their connection, and they must now be aware that if Dave were killed they would be the first suspects. This makes it less likely they will try again.’

‘Crikey,’ Lynnie said, ‘Go on.’

‘When Walt and I went to Orpheus Farm this morning saying we were making a survey for new fire precautions, Offen wasn’t worried. He didn’t know me from Adam then, of course. It was before you showed him my photograph. But he showed no anxiety at all about two strangers turning up on a pretext that he didn’t even bother to check. None of the edginess one might have expected if he’d just had one stolen horse pinched back from him, and was in possession of two others standing in his barn. I didn’t like it. It didn’t feel right.’

‘He hasn’t got them,’ Eunice said with relief. ‘I was sure it couldn’t possibly be right that Culham Offen would steal horses. I mean, he’s respected.’

Walt and I exchanged a glance of barely perceptible amusement. To be respected was the best cover in the world for fraud. Fraud, in fact, could rarely exist without it.

‘So,’ I said, ‘I thought it would be helpful if he knew for certain that I was especially interested in Moviemaker and Centigrade, and that I wasn’t in fire insurance, but was the man he had to thank for losing Chrysalis. When I went back, after you two had left, he still wasn’t worried. On the contrary, he was enjoying the situation. It amused him enormously to think that I believed I was fooling him. I asked him a lot of questions about the security precautions surrounding Moviemaker and Centigrade, and he was still completely untroubled. So,’ I paused, ‘it’s now quite clear that the two horses standing in his barn called Moviemaker and Centigrade are in actual fact exactly what he says: Moviemaker and Centigrade. He isn’t worried about snoopers, he isn’t worried about me making clumsy preparations to steal them. He must therefore be confident that any legal proceedings will prove the horses to be the ones he says they are. He’d ambush me if I tried to steal them, and have me in real deep trouble, which would be to him some small compensation for losing Chrysalis.’

Walt nodded briefly.

Eunice said obstinately. ‘I think it only proves that you’re barking up the wrong damn tree. He isn’t worried simply because he isn’t guilty of anything.’

‘You liked him?’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘He was bloody sweet.’

Lynnie nodded. ‘I thought so too.’

‘What did he say when you showed him the photographs?’

‘He just glanced at them at first,’ Lynnie said. ‘And then he took them over to the window. And then he asked me who had taken them, and where, and when. So I told him about the day on the river, and about you and Dave going under the weir...’

At the side of my vision Eunice gave me an I-told-you-so smile.

‘...and he said one or two nice things about you,’ Lynnie finished. ‘So I told him you came over here to look for Chrysalis, and somehow or other you found him.’

‘He asked where you found him,’ Eunice nodded. ‘But we didn’t know. I said you were now trying to find Allyx, and it certainly didn’t worry him. I’m sure you must be wrong.’

I smiled at her. She didn’t want the horse found, and as an ally she was as reliable as thin ice on a sunny day. I didn’t intend to tell her anything in future which I wasn’t prepared to have passed on to Offen. Like most law abiding citizens she had not grasped that a criminal mind didn’t show, that an endearing social manner could co-exist with fraud and murder. ‘Such a nice man,’ the neighbours say in bewilderment, when Mr Smith’s garden is found to be clogged with throttled ladies. ‘Always so pleasant.’

Eunice, propelled by a strong semi-conscious wish for him not to have Allyx, might tell Offen anything, simply because she couldn’t visualize a ‘sweet’ man being deadly. She might also tell him anything propelled by the same impulse which had made her point a gun at me.

‘Let’s have dinner,’ I suggested; and Eunice and Lynnie went away to freshen up.

Walt looked at me thoughtfully, then raised his eyebrows.

I nodded. ‘I put a bug on the underside of his desk, two feet from the telephone. I was late back because I was listening. He called Yola and told her about my visit but there wasn’t much else. I left the set hidden, and came back here.’

‘Do you mean it, that those two horses really are Moviemaker and Centigrade?’

‘Sure. He bought them, remember. Openly. At bloodstock sales. And obviously he’s kept them. I suppose he never could be certain that some ex-owner would turn up for a visit. Those horses will have been tattooed inside their mouths with an identity number when they first began to race. They have to be, over here, don’t they? It’ll be quite easy to establish that they’re the right two.’

‘You don’t think Mrs Teller’s right... that he never had Showman and Allyx after all?’

‘I’ll play you his call to Yola some time. He had the foresight to whisk those horses away from Orpheus when we got Chrysalis. He was more or less waiting for something like our visit this morning. No flies on Culham James, I’m afraid. Er... Walt, did you give Eunice and Lynnie any details about our jaunt in the Tetons?’

He looked uncomfortable. ‘I was annoyed with you.’

‘What exactly did you tell them?’

‘Not much. I was horrified at Lynnie having shown Offen that picture of the Clives, and when Mrs Teller said you’d planned it I said you must be mad, they’d tried to kill you once already.’

‘And you told them how?’

He nodded, not meeting my eyes.

‘Did you tell them about the bugs and the wireless set?’

‘No.’

‘It’s important, Walt.’

He looked up. ‘I didn’t mention them.’

I relaxed. ‘How about our mountain walk?’

‘No details.’

‘Place?’

‘I’m pretty sure I mentioned the Tetons.’

Nothing there that would hurt.

‘How much did you say about Showman and Allyx?’

‘I told them that you’d worked out through the stud books that Offen must have them.’

‘Did you say the words “Uncle Bark”?’

He shook his head. ‘I’d forgotten about that.’

I sighed. ‘Walt. Mrs Teller doesn’t want Allyx found any more than she wanted Chrysalis. Let’s not entrust the state of the nation to the Indians.’

He flushed a little and compressed his mouth. Eunice and Lynnie came back shortly after, and, though we all four had dinner together it proved a taciturn and not over-friendly affair.

Walt rode up to my room for a conference after the coffee.

‘How do we find them?’ he said, coming bluntly to the point and easing himself simultaneously into the only armchair.

‘They’ve made us a gift of them, in one way,’ I said thoughtfully. ‘We can send a bunch of lawyers in to query Moviemaker and Centigrade’s identity, and get it established beyond doubt that the two Offen showed us are in fact those two horses. He’ll be keen for them to do it: and once he’s done it, he’ll be stuck with them. We will meanwhile do another little vanishing trick with the other two and start our own identification parade on our ground. Once they are established as Allyx and Showman, Offen cannot possibly claim them back.’

‘Two objections,’ Walt said. ‘We don’t know where Allyx and Showman are. And if we find them, why not get lawyers into the act right away? Why go to all the danger and trouble of taking them?’

‘Same as Chrysalis,’ I pointed out. ‘The first sign of any real trouble, and they’d be shot. It’s not illegal to kill a horse and whisk it smartly off to the dog food people. And vastly more difficult to identify a dead one. Impossible, I’d almost say, for the degree of certainty we need here.’

‘Even if we take them, and establish their identity, and everything goes smoothly, Offen will still be raking in those colossal stud fees of half a million dollars a year, because we’d never be able to prove that for the past ten years Showman has been siring every foal that’s down in the book as Moviemaker’s...’

I smiled. ‘We’ll do something about that, once we’ve sorted out the rest.’

‘Which brings us back to square one,’ Walt said flatly. ‘Where the hell do we start?’

I perched on the window sill and looked down sideways into the brightly lit car park. Coloured bulbs on the face of the motel raised rainbow shimmers on glossy hard tops and struck me as a deeply melancholy commentary on human achievement. Yet I wouldn’t have wanted to live without cars or electricity... if I’d wanted to live. My room was only two floors up, with none above. Too near the ground. I’d known of a woman who’d jumped from five and bungled it. A gun was better...

‘Well?’ Walt said insistently.

‘I’m sorry...?’ I said vaguely, turning my head back to him.

‘Where do we look?’

‘Oh... yes.’

‘On the ranch?’

‘Very doubtful, don’t you think? They must know that’s the first place we’d think of.’

‘There’s a lot of land there,’ he said. ‘And a lot of horses to lose them in.’

I shook my head. ‘They’d have to keep them in a paddock close to the house. All the rest of the ranch is well named Rocky Mountains, and they couldn’t turn them loose for fear of them breaking a leg. We’d better check, though.’ I stared unseeingly at the carpet. ‘But I guess the horses are with Matt. Offen is at Orpheus Farm, and Yola is tied to the ranch seeing to about thirty guests, so where’s Matt?’

‘Where indeed,’ Walt said gloomily.

‘He and Yola don’t spend their winters on the ranch because the valley is blocked by snow. She told me that they go south... On one of those telephone calls she told Offen they couldn’t keep Chrysalis at a place called Pitts, because it wasn’t suitable. But that was when they didn’t know we were after them... when it wasn’t an emergency.’

‘So somewhere south of the Tetons we find this Pitts, and Matt and the horses will be waiting for us?’

‘Yeah.’ I smiled briefly. ‘Sounds too easy.’

‘Easy!’ Walt said.

‘They must leave a forwarding address for mail,’ I pointed out. ‘They live a conventional law-abiding life with a longstanding business to give them obvious legal means of support. There must be dozens of people in Jackson who know their winter address.’

Our Buttress agent could get that, then. First thing in the morning.’

‘Fine.’

Walt levered himself out of the armchair and hesitated.

‘Come along to my room,’ he said. ‘I’ve got a bottle.’

I wasn’t sure that I wanted to, but he smiled suddenly, wiping out all resentments, and one didn’t kick that sort of olive branch in the teeth.

‘Be glad to,’ I said.

The smile went deeper and lasted along the passage to his room, which was almost identical to mine. The window looked out on the same cars from a slightly different angle, and he had two armchairs instead of one. There was a bottle of Old Grandad on a round tray with glasses and a water jug, and on his bedside table stood a leather-framed photograph. I picked it up idly while he went to fetch ice from the machine along the passage. Walt with his family. A good-looking woman, a plain girl in her early teens, a thin boy of about ten: all four of them smiling cheerfully into the lens. He came back as I was putting them down.

‘I’m sorry about the picnic,’ I said.

‘Next week will do just as well,’ he said. ‘We’ve got the whole of the summer, I guess.’

We sat in the armchairs, drinking slowly. I didn’t like bourbon much; but that wasn’t the point. He talked casually about the split-level ranch-type house they’d moved into the year before, and how his daughter got along just fine with the folks next door, and how they’d had trouble with the boy’s health, he’d had rheumatic fever...

‘How about your own future, with Buttress Life?’ I asked.

I’ve gotten about as high as I’ll get,’ he said with surprising honesty. ‘There’s only one more step up that I really want, and that’s to chief investigator, claims division, and that’ll come along next year when the present guy retires.’

He poured more drinks, rubbed his thumb slowly over the round fingertips, and said Amy and the kids were asking him for a pool in their back yard, and that Amy’s mother was a problem since Amy’s father died last fall, and that he hadn’t caught a single ball game last season, he’d been that busy...

We sat for more than an hour without mentioning the horses once. He yawned finally and I uncurled myself from the soft chair, putting down the third time empty glass. He said goodnight sleepily with easy friendliness and, for the first time since I’d known him, without tension. Back in my own room, undressing, I wondered how long it would last. Until I made the next unpopular suggestion, I supposed. I didn’t know whether to envy him his enclosing domesticity or to feel stifled by it. I did know that I liked him both as a man and as a working companion, moods and all.

The Buttress Life agent in Jackson came through with the Clives’ winter address within twenty minutes of Walt calling him: 40159 Pittsville Boulevard, Las Vegas, Nevada.

I remembered Yola’s smile at the thought of winter. Las Vegas explained it. Yola liked to gamble.

‘What now?’ Walt said.

‘I’ll go on out there and take a look.’

‘Alone?’ There was a certain amount of anxiety in his voice, which I interpreted as a desire not to be left in Santa Barbara with Eunice.

‘We need you here,’ I said placatingly. ‘And don’t tell her where I’ve gone.’

He gave me a sharp glance. ‘I won’t.’

We drove in the hired car out to Orpheus Farm, where I showed him where I’d hidden the radio tape recorder between three rocks, with its aerial sticking up through the branches of a scrubby bush. The nearest neatly railed paddock was only feet away; the house, about four hundred yards. We picked up the radio and parked a short distance down the road.

‘Supposing he sees us?’ Walt said, watching me wind back the reel.

‘He’ll only think we’re watching the farm routine, to know when to pinch Moviemaker. The radio will pick up the bug in his office from at least a quarter mile, but it gets fainter after that. It has to work on the air-vibration system. Not such a good amplification as electricity. Do you ever use them?’

‘Bugs?’ He shook his head. ‘Not often. Cameras with telescopic lenses are better. Catch the claimants walking around on their paralysed legs.’ Satisfaction echoed in his voice. Like me, a rogue hunter to the bone.

Smiling to myself, I switched on. Cutting in and out, Culham James’ various conversations filled three-quarters of an hour of tape time, but nothing he said was of any use to us. I rewound the reels again and we put the radio in among the rocks, Walt agreeing that he would come back after sunset and listen to the day’s take.

He drove me then to the Los Angeles airport, where I hopped on a plane to Las Vegas, arriving mid afternoon. The desert hit like a gust from an oven when they opened the plane doors, and from a nearby building the usual lighted numbers proclaimed to the populace that in the shade, if they could find any, it would be 108.

The air-conditioning at the edge of town motel I booked into was turning itself inside out under the strain, and the Hertz man who presently took my money admitted that this was a little old heatwave, sure thing. Had to expect them, in July. The inconspicuous Pontiac he hired me was this time, however, a cooled one. I drove around for a while to get my bearings, and then took a look at Pittsville Boulevard.

The high numbers ran two miles out of the town, expensive looking homes along a metalled road with the desert crowding in at their rear. The Clives’ house was flanked by others on both sides: not near enough to touch, but too near for the invisible stabling of stallions. The place on Pitts wasn’t suitable, as Yola had said.

It was low and white, with a flat roof and a frame of palms and orange trees. Blinds and insect screens blanked out the windows, and the grass on each side of the drive was a pale dry biscuit colour, not green watered like its neighbours. I stopped the car in the roadway opposite and looked it over. Not a leaf moved under the bleaching sun. Ten minutes ticked away. Nothing happened in the street. Inside the car, with the engine stopped, the temperature rose like Christmas prices. I started up again, sucked in the first cold blast from the air-conditioner, and slid on along the way I was heading.

A mile past the Clives’ house the metal surface ended, and the road ran out across the desert as a dusty streak of gravel. I turned the car and went back, thinking. The comparative dead-endedness of Pittsville Boulevard explained the almost total lack of traffic past the Clives’, and also meant that I couldn’t drive past there very often without becoming conspicuous to the neighbours. Keeping a check on an apparently empty house, however, wasn’t going to get me much farther.

About five houses along on the town side of the Clives’ there was another with water-starved brownish grass. Taking a chance that these inhabitants too were away from home I rolled the Pontiac purposefully into the palm-edged driveway and stopped outside the front door. Ready with some of Walt’s insurance patter, I leant on the bell and gave it a full twenty seconds. No one came. Everything was hot, quiet, and still.

Strolling, I walked down the drive and on to the road. Looking back one couldn’t see the car for bushes. Satisfied, I made the trip along to the Clives’, trying to look as if walking were a normal occupation in a Nevada heatwave: and by the time I got there it was quite clear why it wasn’t. The sweat burnt dry on my skin before it had a chance to form into beads.

Reconnoitring the Clives’ place took an hour. The house was shut up tight, obviously empty. The window screens were all securely fastened, and all the glass was covered on the inside with blinds, so that one couldn’t see in. The doors were fastened with safe-deposit locks. The Clives had made casual breaking-in by vagrants nearly impossible.

With caution I eased round the acre of land behind the house. Palms and bushes screened a trefoil-shaped pool from being overlooked too openly by the neighbours, but from several places it was possible to see the pools of the flanking houses some sixty yards away. Beside one of them, reminding me of Eunice, a woman in two scraps of yellow cloth lay motionless on a long chair, inviting heatstroke and adding to a depth of suntan which would have got her reclassified in South Africa. I moved even more quietly after I’d seen her, but she didn’t stir.

The rear boundary of the Clives’ land was marked by large stones painted white, with desert scrub on the far side and low growing citrus bushes on the near. From their windows, brother and sister had a wide view of hills and wilderness; two miles down the road neon lights went twenty rounds with the midday sun, and the crash of fruit machines out-decibelled the traffic. I wondered idly how much of Uncle Bark’s illicit proceeds found their way into Matt and Yola’s pocket, and how much from there vanished into the greedy slot mouths in Vegas. The stud fees went around and around and only Buttress Life were the losers.

On the way back to the motel I stopped at every supermarket I came to, and bought two three-pound bags of flour from each.

From a hardware store I acquired a short ladder, white overalls, white peaked cotton cap, brushes, and a half-gallon can of bright yellow instant drying paint.